Sept 2017 – Presentation – Western Bridge Engineers Seminar

Title: Fact Based Bridge Performance Management in the Age of the Internet of Things

Bridge owners and managers are innovating in their approach to bridge management through performance based life-cycle management. Opportunities exist to create the 150-year bridge using performance monitoring, and life cycle analytics combined with selective maintenance and bridge rehabilitation. This new approach allows for much more productive management of the costly bridge asset a bridge manager is responsible to maintain. At the recent TRB Meeting: Rehabilitation and Maintenance Working Group on SHM (January 2017). The members statedthat “There is a growing consensus on the need to transition to data driven objective decision making in the realm of managing highway infrastructures.”

Achieving this will require the use of sensing, monitoring, simulation and information technologies to obtain, visualize and interpret quantitative performance data from bridges. The new technologies provided by the Internet of Things including low cost accurate sensors, RF and cellular communication and cloud computing provide a new information technology that enables the innovation of fact based decision making. The technology combined with proper policy and strategy, allows for a magnitude change in bridge performance and productivity.